Entertainment

World's First Review of Streamy - The AJAX-based Digg Rival

We just landed the first invites to Streamy, the site some consider to be a rival to Digg. Here's a brief walkthrough.

You begin on the "Start Page", Streamy's name for what most social news sites call the frontpage. This shows the hot stories now, over the last 24 hours, over the last 7 days and over the last month. The stories are personalized to you - that's one advantage over Digg, which has promised personalization but hasn't delivered so far. But it's not too personalized, says co-founder Donald Mosites: they include community selections to increase variety.

On the far right is the Networks List, which we think is the major benefit over Digg: this shows all your friends and lets you instant message them and enter group chatrooms: in other words, real time interaction with friends. There's also a bunch of ajax on all pages, allowing you to drag and drop elements on to what I would call "action bubbles" - share, save and email stories using drag and drop. You can also drop stories on to your friends to share with them; this interaction is extremely innovative and - dare we say - fun. You get little pings to alert you to new events, making this an addictive, real-time experience. You can set your online status to Available, Away, or Invisible.

"Streams", meanwhile, are RSS feeds from other sites: you can use this part of Streamy as a feed reader, although it seems more limited than standalone apps. Finally, there are profile pages for everything: people, groups.

First impressions: Streamy is a heavily AJAX-based version of Digg with an extremely innovative interface. However, I counted almost no page loads, which means their traffic will be under-measured by many stat companies even if they do get popular, it's hard to link to stories directly, and they won't get all those search rankings that drive a lot of Digg's traffic. That said, the interface is simply stunning: the stuff these guys are doing with AJAX will blow you away. We'll be posting lots of screenshots here when we're done playing. ;)

Streamy is based in Hermosa Beach, California, and has funding from angels including Driftwood Investments, LLC.

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